Progress in the SGI Resurrection Project

ebay is my friend. It looks as though one of the prob­lems that I was encoun­ter­ing is that the exter­nal SCSI CD-ROM that I was using for the instal­la­tion was dying and even­tu­al­ly dead. For $10 I got a 32x SCSI CD-ROM and it took about 90 min­utes to replace. That’s a long time to replace a CD-ROM, but there were a few snags. Noth­ing that stopped me, just sil­ly stuff like hav­ing to remove the exter­nal box’s SCSI con­nec­tors to turn them upside-down so that the cable would fit into the back of the new CD-ROM device.

I bought a new set of install CDs, a lit­tle old­er than the ones I had already, but still a rea­son­ably recent ver­sion. Hope­ful­ly I’ll be able to recoup some of the loss by sell­ing the new­er install CDs.

But final­ly I’m in to the Irix instal­la­tion pro­ce­dure. It’s pret­ty damn cryp­tic and I’m going to give up for today. I’ve made more progress today than I have in the two years I’ve had this Indigo2. The installer pro­gram is run­ning from the CD and I can go back and look at doc­u­men­ta­tion at my leisure.

Plus, hey, a 32x CD-ROM isn’t fast by any mod­ern stan­dards, but it’s six­teen times faster than the one I’d been using. I only hope that does­n’t cause tim­ing prob­lems when I recon­nect this dri­ve to the RS-6000. (I’m kid­ding, I hope)

OK so I have a weird hob­by for a guy who wants to get out of the tech indus­try. Let me tell you though, tech makes a bet­ter hob­by than a career. Just my opin­ion. Your mileage may vary.

Now, I must resist my pack­rat urge and actu­al­ly throw away the failed dou­ble-speed SCSI CD-ROM dri­ve. (Maybe it can be repaired?) (Why both­er try­ing to repair a piece of junk like this?) Into the trash can it goes!